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Macaroni Rarebit
1 cup boiled macaroni 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 cup grated cheese 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon mustard 1/2 teaspoon paprika 2 eggs 1/2 cup milk Squares of buttered toast Heat the boiled macaroni in the butter, with the cheese and seasonings. When hot and the cheese melted, add the eggs, well beaten in the milk. Stir until the rarebit thickens and serve on toast.
A chafing-dish supper dish that is really a cheese custard poured over pasta. It works on a stovetop, but the gentle heat the original assumes is the whole point.
- The hinge: low heat once the eggs go inThe eggs and milk turn this into a stirred custard, and it will scramble at anything approaching a simmer. Keep the pan over the lowest heat (or over the chafing dish's hot-water bath) and stir constantly until it coats the spoon, roughly 3 to 5 minutes.
- Mustard means dry mustardMustard here is almost certainly dry mustard -- it sits in the list among the other dry seasonings, salt and paprika, rather than being stirred in as a condiment. If substituting prepared mustard, start with about twice the volume and add it with the milk.
- The cheeseGrated cheese here means a firm aged Cheddar or a dry American cheese of the period. Grate it yourself; pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch that makes the sauce grainy. Half a cup grated is about 2 oz.
- MacaroniPeriod cookbooks commonly directed much longer boiling than we would now; this recipe simply assumes the macaroni is already boiled and gives no time. Cook to package directions and stop there, since it will sit in hot sauce afterward.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon plus a salty aged cheese is generous by current palates. Add a quarter teaspoon at the start and correct at the end.
- Chafing dish translationGentle heat -- the recipe names no equipment, but this kind of egg-thickened rarebit was often made in a chafing dish, whose blazer pan sits either directly over the flame or on a water pan. If using one, melt the butter and cheese over direct heat, then move to the water bath before adding the egg mixture. Otherwise use a heavy saucepan on the lowest burner setting or a double boiler.
- Yield and timingServes two as a light supper or four as a savoury course. Have the toast made and buttered before you start, because the rarebit stiffens quickly off the heat.
Chafing-dish cookery had a real vogue in American households between the 1890s and the 1920s, when the spirit-lamp dish moved out of the invalid's room and onto the sideboard as equipment for late suppers, club rooms and bachelor entertaining. Welsh rarebit was the emblematic dish of that fashion, and cookbooks of the period spun out variations endlessly: tomato rarebit, oyster rarebit, and this one, which stretches the cheese with macaroni and binds it with egg into something closer to a soft custard than the classic beer-and-cheese version. The name "rarebit" is itself an eighteenth-century respelling of "rabbit" — "Welsh rabbit" is recorded in the 1720s and "Welsh rarebit" by the 1780s — a joke title for a meatless dish that is generally traced to eighteenth-century Britain.